Announcing PSR-15

Feb 1, 2018

As of January 22nd, 2017 PSR-15: HTTP Server Request Handlers has been accepted. The final vote was 12 members in favor, none opposed, and none abstaining. I am very grateful to everyone that contributed during the last (almost) two years. And especially thankful for Matthew Weier O’Phinney, who ultimately sponsored the PSR and got it through the review phase!

The PSR itself is split into two parts: a middleware interface and a request handler interface. Typically the middleware will perform checks or modifications on the request, pass it to the request handler to generate a response, and then perform checks or modifications on the response before returning it.

Writing a middleware is done by importing the MiddlewareInterface and defining a process() method. This method must generate a response, either by delegating to the request handler or generating it internally. For example, if a middleware was checking CORS headers it would generate a response internally if the request did not have correct headers. If the correct headers are present, it would delegate to the request handler to generate a response. Matthew Weier O’Phinney has a much more in-depth example of middleware on his blog, along with a lot of historical information.

Writing a request handler is less common. Typically the request handler will be implemented in a middleware dispatching system to continue processing a middleware stack. The request handler may also be used as the last item in a middleware stack to execute application code. It is not expected that controllers or domain actions will implement the request handler, though it is possible to do so.

A final note: as of the time of writing this post, just 10 days after the acceptance vote, there are already 107 packages depending on psr/http-server-middleware and over 2000 installs. This is a great vote of confidence from the community!